


Vultures, Eagles

by lilacsigil



Category: Captain America (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Soviet Union
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-23
Updated: 2008-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:18:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1636082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Soviet Union is breaking up. The Winter Soldier and the Black Widow have their orders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vultures, Eagles

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to lonelywalker for a beta so fast it made my head spin, and to st_aurafina for encouraging me to sort out the comics so we can read them.
> 
> Written for dirty diana

 

 

_Tashkent, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, May 1991_

The official hotel bar was full of Americans, and the Winter Soldier was one of them today, leaning on the bar and making exaggerated faces at the roughness of the vodka. Tashkent hadn't seen such an influx of cash since - well, probably since never, as far as he could tell - and the locals were lining up to help the foreigners shed their heavy wallets. Every woman in the room, except for one Australian engineer in khaki shorts and a Caltex badge, was a local: gorgeous, under-dressed, and clinging to the nearest man for dear life. The Winter Soldier wasn't sure whether to feel sorry for them, or optimistic that they, despite a lifetime of training in Communism, could grab hold of a fine capitalist opportunity when they saw one. They certainly looked better off than the blank-faced, cheerless couple running the tiny hotel where he was supposedly staying. He never got much sleep while he was on a mission, though, so he had made sure the acne-spotted Moscow scientist he'd brought with him was safely asleep, then headed out to investigate the commotion that all the foreigners had brought to Tashkent.

"No, no, I'm with Shell," the man beside him - a ruddy-faced Canadian - bellowed in his ear. "Everyone wants a piece of the pie, and we're not going to get it unless we're here! On the ground!" Some of his vodka splashed on the Winter Soldier's mechanical arm, and his brain automatically recorded the temperature change as the cold liquid soaked his sleeve. 

The Winter Soldier grinned back, his American accent and American smile locked and loaded. "Last I heard, half the politicians in Tashkent are lining up with BP and the other half with Exxon. You've got your work cut out for you." He leaned closer and bumped into the Canadian's arm, casually checking him for weapons. Nothing. The man really was as dim as he sounded, not another CIA plant. 

The man laughed and shouted some other business truism, but the Winter Soldier's attention was already elsewhere. A pair of Texans at the far end of the bar were trying to set up some kind of wager, and that was prime territory for information gathering - something that the Texans themselves probably knew as well as he did. He extricated himself from the Canadian's waving arms and sauntered over to the knot of men gathering around the Texans, the assumed identity - an intelligent but slightly gullible Wisconsin geologist - firmly in place. It was a good cover that Karpov's people had put together for him - no-one was interested in an American geologist when Tashkent was full of highly trained, unemployed Russians and Uzbeks who not only had local knowledge, but would work at a tenth the price. Still, no-one questioned his presence, either - the slow collapse of the Soviet Union was bringing vultures in from all over the world. 

The Texans were certainly on the hunt for information, but the Winter Soldier saw nothing to indicate that they were anything more than canny investors taking advantage of men who couldn't cope with the local vodka half as well as they thought they could. He was almost to the point of giving up on this bar and going to the other official hotel for foreigners, when a particular laugh caught his ear and flicked up a warning. It was probably an official warning, he thought, something that had been programmed into him, because his conscious mind hadn't yet caught up with the memory of that sound. He waited a moment longer, then quickly stepped up on the base of a bar stool, balancing neatly so that he could see over everyone's heads. Americans seemed so tall these days, but he had no idea when they had been smaller, or how. 

She was in the middle of a group of men, flirting, ignoring the irritated looks that two dark-haired Uzbek women were sending her. The Winter Soldier could only see the top of her head, but that distinctive shade of red combined with the familiarity of her laugh dragged a broken piece of memory into the present. Her name was Natalia, and she had been a trainee in the Black Widow program - he had sparred with her, on occasion, and he thought that he remembered her as the fastest and best of all of those stern-faced girls, but maybe she had been the worst, after all, her pretty face saving her from elimination, sent to him to improve her skills. There were so many possible stories to every memory, and sometimes the Winter Soldier wished that his brain would just settle on one - the most obvious, he didn't care - and stop trying to reconstruct what he couldn't know. 

Like any good agent, she knew when she was being observed, but the Winter Soldier caught the instant of surprise in her expression, the barest twitch of her eyelids, when she glanced up with casual ease to see who was watching her. He wasn't entirely sure why he hadn't moved away and remained undiscovered - he would have had time - but there was a reason to talk to her, he was sure. He caught her look, then turned and pushed through the crowd away from her. He knew she would follow, given time, because her curiosity had always been her greatest flaw. Past the clumps of drunken engineers and junior executives, the Uzbek women all but plucking the cash from their wallets, the Winter Soldier leaned against a door and used the strength of his artificial arm to crack the handle apart, letting him into a tiny storeroom. He pulled the cord for the light and it glowed dimly, illuminating a room full of vodka in crates, and, more precious, a small stash of East German Radeberger beer. The Winter Soldier had no idea whether it was currently banned or not, but he hadn't had one in a long time. He reached out his human hand - the metal one wasn't always as sensitive as it should be, though the current model seemed to be pretty capable - but before he could grab the beer, Natalia threw open the door and slammed it right into him.

He staggered backwards a step, catching himself before he fell into the bottles of vodka, and Natalia took advantage of the momentum to step nimbly around the door and throw an arm around his neck, pulling them together for a hard kiss with a vodka afterburn. 

"I thought you were dead!" She spoke in English, and the Winter Soldier was startled for a moment. She was right, though - anything the English-speakers overheard would be far less incriminating that anything the Russian-speakers reported. He thought of the old joke - Americans were mostly scared of the Russians, and so were the Russians. 

"Out of commission, maybe. Not dead."

She looked a few years older than when he had seen her last, and she no longer looked like a scrawny teenager - instead, her leather jacket clung to the curve of her breasts, and he tried not to stare. No need to let her keep the advantage. As usual, his internal clock and his mission info-dump disagreed, scratching against each other like sandpaper on skin. He had maybe thirty-seven days of memory since she had been a KGB trainee in the Widow program, and yet here they were in 1991, and she looked the same age as him, whatever that was. Early 20s, maybe. 

She touched his face, her nails as short as a factory worker's. "So, you're here to take care of the defector? The little traitor spider who turned on her masters?"

He blinked rapidly, and suddenly the artificial sense of alarm that had sprung up when he had heard her laughter made sense - she wasn't on his side any more, whatever that side was. 

"I'm here watching the Americans, not here to kill you. I didn't know you'd be here." He should push her away, he knew, but her hand was surprisingly soft against his stubble.

"They would send the Winter Soldier this far just for reconnaissance? How wasteful." 

"The Winter Soldier," he couldn't help the sarcasm, "Is more than capable of carrying out two tasks at once." 

She grins, and he shakes his head. She walked him right into admitting that he wasn't just here for information, and he should have known better.

"As long as neither task is to kill me, I'll be a happy girl. Are you still working for old Karpov?"

"Life's complicated, these days. It's hard to even remember the country you're working for, let alone which old man. Easier for you, I suppose." He wondered to which country she'd fled, but the cut of her jacket made it obvious - Britain and France didn't pay their converted spies so well. "You look good."

"I know. You look...the same. They named you well."

"I suppose they did. Not a name a parent would choose, but a good name nonetheless."

"They wouldn't waste you on a bar full of drunken Americans, either."

"Nor you."

She smiled, though it looked smooth and less than heartfelt. "I have my mission. I can't very well operate close to Moscow at the moment." She gestured at her own face. "Too well known."

"We're a long way from Moscow." The Winter Soldier could feel the connections forming in his head, and this time he welcomed them, pulling together strands that were closer to supposition than knowledge. He felt so slow, watching Natalia's mercurial expressions, every tiny movement of her lips. He was fairly sure, though, that there was something about her that he trusted, something in her that saw further than other people could. Further than he could, with his mind full of ruins and shouted orders.

Natalia waited, her fingers just brushing his unfamiliar long hair. 

He took a breath. "There's a man named Abramov at my hotel. I'm escorting him into the mountains tomorrow." The Winter Soldier wanted to think of him as harmless, a scientist wrapped up in his cloud formations and his calculations, but he himself had been the subject of too many scientific inquiries to really believe that the process of learning could be entirely harmless. No, it was better this way. 

"I don't know the name."

"He's not in the business. He's a meteorologist."

She frowned. "He needs the Winter Soldier holding his hand to go look at the weather now?" 

"If you need to travel quietly through the mountains, to precise observation points, yes, you do." 

Natalia frowned, running through the possibilities. The Winter Soldier could see the exact moment that the pieces of information came together: meteorology plus distance plus a military escort led to a single conclusion.

"No! Gorbachev would never allow -" She stopped, wincing at her own naivety. "He wouldn't allow a nuclear strike. But an accident? He can't do anything about that. Lucky the winds won't blow the fallout to Moscow, or to your superiors' dachas on the Black Sea. It will be very clean, and no-one in the West will care half as much for dead Asian Muslims as they would for dead Latvians on Europe's doorstep. It will be a great encouragement for the other republics to stay with Moscow."

The Winter Soldier did not have the capacity to confirm her theories - he'd been lucky that no-one had thought to block him from mentioning Abramov's profession - so he simply shrugged. "We'll see what Abramov finds." 

Her mouth twisted slightly, not really a smile, but some kind of recognition. "It's very dangerous up there. An escort such as you will protect him well."

"I have my orders."

"As do I." She looked at him through her lashes, and this time he was the one to kiss her, and he could almost remember doing this somewhere else, somewhere cold and lonely, but with the warmth of trust between them. Natalia twisted away after a moment, though with a smile, and slipped back into the rowdy bar. The Winter Soldier waited two minutes exactly, then hid one of the German beers in the saggy pockets of his American jeans and walked casually through the drunken crowd and out into the slightly cooler air of the Tashkent night. 

Back at the hotel, the Winter Soldier woke Abramov, who was snoring in his narrow bed. 

"Get up. It's 0400 hours, and we need to be into the mountains by dawn if we want to get to all the anemometers today."

Abramov groaned, but hauled himself up and they were underway quickly, rattling out of the city and into the hills in a bone-shaking army jeep, a 469 model that was probably older than Abramov, though the Winter Soldier had no idea where to place his own chronology in relation to their transport. He was fairly sure that after an hour rattling along the mountain roads, he'd certainly feel like a sixty-year-old, and Abramov's annoying cheeriness and constant comments about the excellent weather were not helping his mood. 

The ambush came as they got out of the jeep, preparing to hike up into the mountains. The Winter Soldier leaned forward to grab their packs from the jeep, and the next moment Abramov was dead on the ground, blood trickling from a tiny hole in the side of his head. The Winter Soldier froze for a moment, his brain conflicted between his well-trained instinct to find cover and the programmed mission overrides telling him to run towards the shooter and attack. The next shot took out one of the jeep's fuel tanks and suddenly the need to run and the need to survive were in perfect harmony - he turned and raced up the rough, pebbled mountainside, away from the fuel leak but towards the shots. The craggy rocks of the dry terrain were enough to keep him out of harm's way, but also provided a thoroughly painful landing when the inevitable explosion threw him forwards into a boulder. He took the impact on his metal shoulder, managed to keep his feet and kept running, pushing hard up the slope.

Natalia was clipping her rifle to the side of her bulky pack when he spotted her, and she must have been taken aback by his speed because she left her shell casings where they had fallen and sprinted away, her small feet and excellent balance lending her speed on the uneven ground. She didn't drop the pack, though, swinging it onto her shoulders despite that movement costing her a few precious meters. The Winter Soldier ran harder, the mission programming thrumming in his head, leaving just enough space to hope that he caught her before he had to shoot her. 

Natalia solved his dilemma herself. Her hurried escape took her to the edge of a ravine, and she halted, rocks skittering down the steep slope into nowhere. He slowed - covering the possible escape routes was more important than speed right now - and advanced on her.

"You only delayed it, Natalia."

"A delay is good enough - everything is changing so fast. I hope they let you change with it."

The Winter Soldier shook his head, confused at her concern for him when she was the one cornered, then lunged forward as she leapt gracefully off the cliff.

"Natalia!" Even throwing himself full-length on the ground, he couldn't reach her, and he watched in horror as she spiralled down and down - until a pair of glider wings snapped out of her pack and her fall turned into a graceful flight. She wasted no time getting out of his sight, though, and he could recognise that she was right not to trust him, at least not when General Karpov's commands spoke stronger than his own voice.

He turned and trudged back down the incline, towards the remains of the jeep and the body of the young meteorologist. The Winter Soldier hoped that he'd feel more distressed at the loss of life if he were allowed to see Abramov as anything more than a mission directive, but he had no way of knowing, and he was fairly sure that this mission would soon be erased from his memory anyway. It was easy for the Winter Soldier to keep his perfect success rate when no-one knew about the abject failures, especially the ones where he'd managed to undermine himself. 

Movement caught his eye, and he looked upwards into the sun - he thought he saw Natalia soaring to freedom, but it was just one of the giant vultures that inhabited these mountains, casting a broad shadow in the sunlit morning. 

 


End file.
